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Salient: An organ of student opinion at Victoria University, Wellington. Vol. 23, No. 4. Wednesday, May 4, 1960

"With Myself"

"With Myself"

"I began where, I imagine, so many writers begin—with myself. I was possessed of all the wonder ful freedom of a complete ignorance; excited by possibility so vast that, ludicrous and untutored though I know the view to have been, I can yet sigh for the faith of it, the strength of it. I can hear still the crazy voice of com plete confidence, and as though it were a figure beyond me, I would avert for it. if 1 could, that harshness of discovering how crazy will be the failure

"The autobiographical form is a common one for beginners. It is a natural starting-point. Even some years later than this, I still stood plumb.-centre in my disordered and motiveless world, and endeavoured to deal with that chaos by reaching out and grasping haphazard pieces. But now, though the ex pression was graceless … I was looking out, whereas before it had all been a matter of looking in, of trying to give expression to my own ferment…

"What was it, then that that jacketed boy had to learn? No less than everything … What he was endeavouring to do, crudely, was to organise his experience into some pattern.

"I see him waist deep, then in the flood; in a landscape where was no sign of dying slave or breaking square; where the deseriptions he had been given, the map he had been taught to read, made no reference to these high bluffs and broken boulders, these peaks of snow and plains of tussock. What he had to do was to unpick the reach-me-down cloak of his education. Trained to think, for example, of beauty as residing in the object he had to learn that it true character lay in the strength of the imaginative response. His problem is mine."

In conclusion, Mr Duggan pointed out that the "leather-jacketed youth" was meant to be "something of a tease," drawn from selected facts and filled out by invention.

"Critic."